A couple of Sundays ago, The New York Times published "The Follower Factory," and the article had me on my couch praising not only its exposé, but also the mesmerizing graphics. You see the more I work on social media campaigns, the less I want to use the platforms myself.
Audiences are sliced and diced based on items they have liked, where they live, their connections and personal preferences. You can be targeted based on array of factors that indicate your personal taste as well as your actual demographics. This is unsettling, especially since most people don't understand how the sponsored content ends up in their feeds.
Luckily, I work on public health campaigns, and targeting that I do simply encourages better health. However, with the 2016 political campaigns, we know that this targeting is particularly effective at reinforcing some of our worst instincts, and it is difficult to decipher fact from fiction. We also tend to end up in our own silos, with our own philosophies emphasized over and over again. With these platforms changing regularly, it's hard for systems like government to set transparency rules and regulations that bind.
This lack of regulations has led to the social media fraud/lack of transparency that is especially rampant. One first step for several figures who want to be noteworthy experts is to purchase followers to seem influential. I follow Hilary Rosen, one of the political influencers named in the article. I saw her speak at an Atlantic event, looked her up and those thousands of purchased followers likely help convince me to follow her, too.
Rosen and others like her purchased followers from one company in particular, Devumi. This company has "provided customers with more than 200 million followers" - many of which are bots that mirror real accounts. Like the article says, "these accounts are counterfeit coins in the booming economy of online influence, reaching into virtually any industry where a mass audience — or the illusion of it — can be monetized."
That's a shame. The general public needs to be educated on how these platforms market to and mislead them.